


The Same Strange Animal

by th_esaurus



Category: Legend (2015)
Genre: Casual Sex, Implied/Referenced Incest, M/M, Rough Sex, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-09
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-04-19 23:29:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4765010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"People say we look alike but they got no fuckin' sense. I'm a fuckin' mutt. Reggie's a thoroughbred."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Same Strange Animal

There is a common misconception about Ronnie, and it is that he is quietly brutal. Too dense or too warped to soliloquise about his violence. People tend to remember the immediacy of fists over words regardless.

Thing is, Ronnie loves talking.

He just mostly loves talking about Reg.

*

When he's calm, he often asks Teddy what he thinks of Reg. Comparisons of their looks, their temperaments, their builds. Teddy's honest mouth has got him slapped more than once, and he knows from experience that Ronnie's hands are heavy and hurting, but that doesn't stop him telling the truth. "He's softer in the face than you," he shrugs, rubbing his palm along his own sloping jaw. "Gentle-like, isn't he? Sort of prettier."

He is, after all, soft on Reggie. Everyone is. Single mothers abandoned by down-and-out husbands, casino-bound starlets, happily married twenty-somethings. Everyone turns their heads coyly for Reggie Kray.

A lot of the boys, too. A lot of Ron's boys stare at Reggie.

Ron nods absently. "People say we look alike but they got no fuckin' sense. I'm a fuckin' mutt. Reggie's a thoroughbred."

"Same blood, though," Teddy grins, "Same bones."

This seems to please Ronnie. He's a strange one for compliments. Doesn't like being buttered up.

It's morning, and already-dappled sunlight is just beginning to creep through the broken blinds of Ronnie's caravan. He's been saying to Teddy, in recent weeks, that he would like to buy a flat, and he would like to install Teddy there as a permanent exhibition. "Your mouth," he murmurs, "is a fucking work of art."

He pushes Teddy's head down and puts his cock between Teddy's lips, painting them white, as if to prove it. One of the old masters, Ron Kray.

"I'm gonna put you in a room and get Reg over to admire you," he growls, rubbing his come and Teddy's spit over his chin with a thick thumb.

"Reg ain't much for sculpture, I guess," Teddy replies, grinning. He wants to put Ron's dick in his throat again, but Ron hates being bullied into getting hard. Patience, boy. Patience.

"You'd fuckin' think," Ron tells him darkly, and he punctuates each word without any subtlety at all.

*

Reggie Kray never formally introduces himself. It's a slow Wednesday at Esmeralda's Barn, rich fucks rather than celebrities, low rollers instead of photographers, and Reggie blesses Teddy with a moment of his time while Ron's gone wandering.

He's already nursing his third drink, plied and made pliant by Ron, but Reg says, "Teddy Smith?" and nods at the barman, and a whiskey on the rocks is swiftly presented to him on a neat brass tray. Not cheap whiskey, by the rich smell of it.

Teddy has never seen Reg this close up before. He's a patchwork of rumour and description, glimpses and assumptions, just like Ron is to everyone else.

He really is prettier than Ron, by a considerable margin.

He has the exact same presence, though. The same hook.

Reggie eyes Teddy up and down, sitting far enough back that he can take in the measure of him at a steady glance. "He treats you well enough?" he asks, finally. Perhaps not the first question that ran through his mind.

Teddy shrugs, smiling sharply. "I wanna be treated how he treats me."

"Good lad," Reggie says, returning the smile. He sounds a little tight.

Not long after this brief overture, Reggie begins using Teddy as a casual go-between, a mouthpiece between he and his brother. Not for business, nothing as formal as that; just off-hand comments that betray a deep river of care running through Reggie that never quite runs dry. No matter how difficult Ron can be.

"Slip Ron his pills, will you, Ted?" Reg asks, passing Teddy two prescription bottles, one current and one long backdated—

"Ron needs his eyes checkin', he's squinting like a pig," Reg says casually, his arm around Teddy's shoulder—

"Tell Ron to visit Mum, she's missing him," Reg says, just in passing—

Teddy gets the distinct impression that Mrs Kray, sweet Violet, used to do these little runs between her boys. He quite likes that he's been bestowed a family duty.

Ron always grunts noncommittally when he relays Ronnie's distant mothering. "I'm not a fuckin' garden, see," he says without any particular annoyance. "I don't need _tending._ " He'll see the thing done, though. Whatever it might be.

Just once, Teddy forgets to preface his message with _Reg says._ Makes it sound like his own order that Ron take better care of himself.

Ron backhands him in the mouth for it. His signet ring catches badly, rips a loose fleck of skin from Teddy's bottom lip and makes him bleed. Teddy tongues at the wound, his body crouching away from Ron's taut fists, half flight, half fight.

"Reggie asked me to tell you," he says, his words flabby where he can't quite close his mouth around the sounds.

"Reggie asked you," Ron spits, not assuaged. " _Reggie_ asked you, did he?"

But he doesn't elaborate. A low, garbled diatribe spews from his lips, swearing and slandering, his own crude language. The lilt of it is sordid, somehow. Like he could be talking dirty. He soon wears himself out with his anger, collapses in a chair that creaks dangerously under his weight.

He jerks his head, calling Teddy over to him, and dabs roughly at his split lip, swallows his hissing with kisses that hurt more. "Tell Reg," he says pointedly, "That _Ron_ says, we can talk like fuckin' grown ups, face to face. We talked in the womb, we can talk now."

The next time, three weeks later, when Reg mentions to Teddy that Ron's gotta fetch his suit from the dry cleaners, he's left it there too long and they'll keep the bloody thing like they did last time—

This time, Teddy tells Ron _Reg says_ first, and Ron grunts noncommittally and picks up his suit the next day.

*

Ronnie buys his flat, his little palace, and has it decked out with both care and forethought. Teddy likes Ron best when he disregards people's expectations of him – a brute, a mess, a nutcase – and puts his own twist on things. Glossy black paint on the fireplace, framed pictures on the wall, military and nautical, dreamy green wallpaper that he takes great pride in telling Teddy is after William Morris, you know, fuckin' genius Morris was, nobody did a fuckin' pattern like William fuckin' Morris.

He keeps a projector in a chestnut side cabinet in the front room, and brings it out to play dirty pictures with no sound. Gets Teddy next to him on the sofa and kneads at his dick while they watch, Ronnie breathing through his mouth. They'll go to bed, after, and Ron is more often than not rough with him.

Teddy likes to be roughed up. He has a sense of pride in that fact, a swell in his chest when he thinks it's part of the reason Ron picked him.

More than one night, Teddy's woken at three in the morning with the duvet doubled up over him and an empty, cooling space on the other side of the bed. Light flickering in from the living room.

He stands in the doorway, naked and jittery, and watches Ronnie watch his films. Ronnie naked too, but sitting like he's in a three piece-suit, always to attention, never slouching, his legs splayed and his fists jammed onto his knees.

Quaint sepia holiday movies from trips to the seaside, he and Reggie as young boys. Larking about with a wooden cart, wheeling one another up and down hills. A joint birthday, a crammed East End flat, the boys fighting over the final candle. Reggie, teenage, lanky and grinning, with a cigarette cocked between his lips and a pair of boxing gloves on his hands. Ron's thick fingers directing him from off-camera, getting him to hold 'em up like a champion.

"It's rude to loiter," Ronnie growls, his voice filling up the room.

So Teddy goes and sits by him and gets his sore dick palmed just like always.

*

Reggie comes over to the flat in the dirty aftermath of a party, slips a few quid in Teddy's back pocket and tells him fondly to make himself scarce for an hour, all right?

Leslie Holt's been circling Ron for a good few months by this point, so Teddy saunters over to the place he rents with his older sister. She's out working, and the two of them get tipsy on cheap whiskey and a bottle of red wine Ron had gifted Leslie in the early days when he was a brief favourite. He leant back on Teddy not long after.

Teddy doesn't much care for Leslie. Finds him weasel-faced and snide. Teddy is of the opinion that if you find something funny, you fuckin' laugh at it. Leslie _smirks_.

They paw at each others' belts, drunk, and blow one another on the thin, scratchy carpet in front of the sofa. Teddy elbows the side table and knocks a glass ashtray off it, leaving a black pockmark on the floor, gaping like a bullet-hole. He goes into hysterics over it, and Leslie slaps him a few times around the cheeks and shoulders to get him to shut up and suck his dick.

Leslie's sister comes home for her lunch-break half way through, swears at them, and storms out again.

Teddy spits when Leslie manages to come, fucks up the carpet even more. He'll send someone round to clean it on Ron's money. Ron won't know, won't mind.

"You always swallow Ron's," Leslie says, petulant.

"Ain't gonna waste it," Teddy grins, his teeth and tongue sticky with semen. Leslie looks at him with huge distaste.

He really doesn't care for Leslie.

As he's doing up his belt, the thought strikes Teddy that this, potentially, was not a dissimilar situation to the scene he was shooed away from. "D'you ever think," he asks with no particular care, "that Ronnie's a bit weird about Reg?"

"Ron's weird about everything," Leslie shrugs, fixing his hair back into its crisp blonde shell.

"He ever talk to you about Reg?"

Leslie's reflection in the dirty mirror looks back at him strangely, backwards. "Ron barely strings two words together when he's gettin' on with it."

Quietly brutal, Teddy thinks, and feels, unequivocally, blessed.

*

Reg had been over to tell Ronnie he was marrying his girl. That was all.

Teddy had been sent away in case Ron took the news—badly.

When he gets back to the flat, the two are all smiles, passing a single cigar between them, Reg saying lightly, "He does get protective of me, this one," as he claps Ron on his sturdy back.

That night, Ron demands that Teddy tuck his dick between his thighs and strut around the living room in a pair of kitten heels. He puts on a jazz record, Chet Baker, and stares as Teddy does his best impression of a coy young fiancée. Climbs daintily into Ron's lap. Brazenly, awfully, calls him _Reggie._

"What do I see in you," Ron growls, low, and Teddy doesn't know whether he's talking for himself, or asking Reg what on earth he's getting from poor Francis.

She never hurt a fly, though Reggie's squashing more than enough for the both of them.

*

There is a brief period of time where Reggie takes his newly crowned queen out of the cloistered, close streets of the East End; first on their honeymoon, and then up into what they called a maisonette in north London. It doesn't last long. The Krays have a funny orbit around each other. Never venturing too far.

Reggie rents the one-bed flat directly below Ron's seven room boudoir.

The floors are thin enough that Teddy can hear Reg fucking his wife sometimes. Frankie's skittering giggle. Reggie's low endearments. A breathy mix of high whines and deep gasps; not the grunting and cussing of Teddy's trysts with Ron.

It sounds boring.

He prefers Ron's rough hands, quick to smack, slower to soothe, let the hurt linger so Teddy knows it was intentional. Likes Ron's inability to call him by his name when he's hilt-deep inside Teddy. Likes that Ron sounds like his boxing roots when he comes, all bellows and groans like he's being hit.

"He's a sweetheart," Ronnie tells Teddy, while they listen in on the soft ruckus from the flat downstairs. They're in bed, Ron's hand tight on Teddy's bare shoulder, pressing fresh bruises into old ones. "It's his Achilles' heel."

"People love him for it though, right Ronnie?"

"Now that's a word with weight," Ronnie grunts, and Teddy settles in against his skin for a meandering speech, his tongue always loosened by his fondness for his twin. "How can people love him if they don't _know_ him, they see he's sweet and kind and mean, but they don't know _how_ sweet and _how_ kind and _how_ mean. He raised me, see, raised me up when our Dad went to shit, went underground so the army wouldn't get him. Raised me up through the war, got me fighting, got me loud. People _love_ him," he snorts, a cruel sound. He kneads the pad of his thumb into Teddy's skin, riled by his own thoughts. "People don't know fuck all about Reggie. I know him better than he knows himself."

"You're a strong lad," Teddy says, fondly mocking. He likes when Ron's worked up; like a half-trimmed tree, he's just so easy to topple. "Bet you're strong enough to carry them weighty words."

"Fuckin' right I am," Ronnie agrees.

Downstairs, Francis lets out a puppishy keening. Without warning, Ron rolls Teddy over, lays on top of him and pushes all the air out of his chest in an echoing wheeze. His gaze is slanted, not looking at Teddy but concentrating elsewhere. He puts his big hand over Teddy's mouth and presses hard, stops him catching his breath. Drags his tongue down Teddy's chest, keeping on long after it goes dry and rough.

The punctuated whine from below is coming in fast gasps now, all the more obvious for Teddy's forced quiet. Ron reaches the concave under Teddy's stomach, and here, here's where any other day he'd work his way back up.

There's a rocking thump, and Reggie's voice, very clearly, hissing his wife's name.

Ron goes on down. His nose brushing along Teddy's half-hard cock. Light-headed, he sneaks a breath through his nose. He's felt the brunt of Ron's thick mouth before now – his crude endearments, his rage, his casual cruelty – but he's never—

Ron always—

"I'm nobody's fuckin' fairy," Ron always—

Ron pauses, listening hard. Visibly cautious, he dips down. Gets just the head of Teddy's cock in his mouth. Lathes around it with his tongue for maybe less than a minute; the longest minute of Teddy's life. He forgets to breathe entirely. His cock twitching, hardening up, the only part of him. He wants to tell Ron, _fuck, do it, do it Ronnie, put it all in there._ He has the very distinct sense that, a long time ago now, Ron Kray has sucked a cock into his mouth before.

Teddy keeps his honest mouth shut as padlocked fucking door.

Abruptly, Ron rolls off him with a wet, slack sound. "That's enough," he snaps. Reaches for his glasses from the bedside table and shoves them on, ambles out of the bedroom, wide-legged as a cowboy, his shoulders hunched. Teddy can see him scrubbing at his mouth with the back of his arm.

As soon as he leaves the room, Teddy heaves in a rattling breath, and listens to Reggie grunt out an orgasm into his lovely wife.

*

Reggie pops round for tea, which Teddy reckons is a euphemism until he's shooed into the kitchen to put the kettle on. He can hear the twins talking low and steady, the timbre of Ron's voice always so different when he's speaking with just Reg. Teddy tinkers with the teacups slowly, not wanting to miss the deep chuckles Ron sprinkles liberally through the conversation, even if he can't hear the context.

As much as Ron is self-aware about anything, he's conscious of his laugh. Makes him sound dense, he's complained.

Doesn't matter when he and Reggie are in each other's shadow.

Ron isn't changeable. He's stalwart, reliably violent, comfortably recognisable on the rough streets of the East End. It's as though Reggie sheds new light on him. Nothing different except the angles; uncovering things that were long-hidden.

"Where's that fuckin' tea, then?"

Reggie strolls amiably into the kitchen, his hands in his pockets. Clucks his tongue at the kettle; Teddy hasn't even turned the gas on. Reg does it for him with a lightness of touch that makes Teddy flush.

"Too busy eavesdropping," Reggie says lightly.

"No point saying no, is there?" Teddy shrugs, grinning.

Reggie moves easily, as if through water; none of Ronnie's lumbering gait. He puts himself between Teddy and the door, his shoulders wide enough to block the way out almost entirely. There's a very vague threat in his stance, and Teddy feels pinned in the same way he does when Ronnie's got his wrists clasped wholly in his hands.

Reggie's a foot away from him.

"Once Ron lets you get involved," he says, his words sounding somehow both casual and pointed, "it's very hard to uninvolve yourself, you know what I'm saying?"

"I'm careful."

"Ron's addictive."

Teddy licks his bottom lip. It's still swollen from a night in with Ronnie. "Are you—careful, Reg?"

It's like glimpsing a bird of prey take flight. In one instance serene, and the next, a huge, taloned thing, twice the size it should be, twice as deadly as a moment before.

All Reggie does is take a step forward and let the hint of a frown cross his brow.

"Why the fuck would I need to be careful around my own brother?"

*

Ronnie loves talking about Reggie, and Teddy loves listening.

He just—

Decides to stop asking.

That's all.


End file.
